Fredric Brown - The Fredric Brown Megapack

“It will be your planet, to live on and to populate. You are the children of Earth but you are the first Martians.”

Of course we had known a lot of those things already.

The last year was the best. By then the air inside the dome—except for the pressurized parts where our teachers and attendants live—was almost like that outside, and we were allowed out for increasingly long periods. It is good to be in the open.

The last few months they relaxed segregation of the sexes so we could begin choosing mates, although they told us there is to be no marriage until after the final day, after our full clearance. Choosing was not difficult in my case. I had made my choice long since and I’d felt sure that she felt the same way; I was right.

Tomorrow is the day of our freedom. Tomorrow we will be Martians, the Martians. Tomorrow we shall take over the planet.

Some among us are impatient, have been impatient for weeks now, but wiser counsel prevailed and we are waiting. We have waited twenty years and we can wait until the final day.

And tomorrow is the final day.

Tomorrow, at a signal, we will kill the teachers and the other Earthmen among us before we go forth. They do not suspect, so it will be easy.

We have dissimulated for years now, and they do not know how we hate them. They do not know how disgusting and hideous we find them, with their ugly, misshapen bodies, so narrow-shouldered and tiny-chested, their weak sibilant voices that need amplification to carry in our Martian air, and above all their white pasty hairless skins.

We shall kill them and then we shall go and smash the other dome so all the Earthmen there will die too.

If more Earthmen ever come to punish us, we can live and hide in the hills where they’ll never find us. And if they try to build more domes here we’ll smash them. We want no more to do with Earth.

This is our planet and we want no aliens. Keep off!

One of the strange things about it was that Aubrey Walters wasn’t at all a strange little girl. She was quite as ordinary as her father and mother, who lived in an apartment on Otis Street, and who played bridge one night a week, went out somewhere another night, and spent the other evenings quietly at home.

Aubrey was nine, and had rather stringy hair and freckles, but at nine one never worries about such things. She got along quite well in the not-too-expensive private school to which her parents sent her, she made friends easily and readily with other children, and she took lessons on a three-quarter-size violin and played it abominably.

Her greatest fault, possibly, was her predilection for staying up late of nights, and that was the fault of her parents, really, for letting her stay up and dressed until she felt sleepy and wanted to go to bed. Even at five and six, she seldom went to bed before ten o’clock in the evening. And if, during a period of maternal concern, she was put to bed earlier, she never went to sleep anyway. So why not let the child stay up?

Now, at nine years, she stayed up quite as late as her parents did, which was about eleven o’clock of ordinary nights and later when they had company for bridge, or went out for the evening. Then it was later, for they usually took her along. Aubrey enjoyed it, whatever it was. She’d sit still as a mouse in a seat at the theater, or regard them with little-girl seriousness over the rim of a glass of ginger ale while they had a cocktail or two at a night club. She took the noise and the music and the dancing with big-eyed wonder and enjoyed every minute of it.

Sometimes Uncle Richard, her mother’s brother, went along with them. She and Uncle Richard were good friends. It was Uncle Richard who gave her the dolls.

“Funny thing happened today,” he’d said. “I’m walking down Rodgers Place, past the Mariner Building—you know, Edith; it’s where Doc Howard used to have his office—and something thudded on the sidewalk right behind me. And I turned around, and there was this package.”

“This package” was a white box a little larger than a shoe box, and it was rather strangely tied with gray ribbon. Sam Walters, Aubrey’s father, looked at it curiously.

“Doesn’t look dented,” he said. “Couldn’t have fallen out of a very high window. Was it tied up like that?”

“Just like that. I put the ribbon back on after I opened it and looked in. Oh, I don’t mean I opened it then or there. I just stopped and looked up to see who’d dropped it—thinking I’d see somebody looking out of a window. But nobody was, and I picked up the box. It had something in it, not very heavy, and the box and the ribbon looked like—well, not like something somebody’d throw away on purpose. So I stood looking up, and nothing happened, so I shook the box a little and—”

“All right, all right,” said Sam Walters. “Spare us the blow-by-blow. You didn’t find out who dropped it?”

“Right. And I went up as high as the fourth floor, asking the people whose windows were over the place where I picked it up. They were all home, as it happened, and none of them had ever seen it. I thought it might have fallen off a window ledge. But—”

“What’s in it, Dick?” Edith asked.

“Dolls. Four of them. I brought them over this evening for Aubrey. If she wants them.”

He untied the package, and Aubrey said, “Oooh, Uncle Richard. They’re—they’re lovely. ”

Sam said, “Hm. Those look almost more like manikins than dolls, Dick. The way they’re dressed, I mean. Must have cost several dollars apiece. Are you sure the owner won’t turn up?”

Richard shrugged. “Don’t see how he can. As I told you, I went up four floors, asking. Thought from the look of the box and the sound of the thud, it couldn’t have come from even that high. And after I opened it, well—look—” He picked up one of the dolls and held it out for Sam Walters’ inspection.

“Wax. The heads and hands, I mean. And not one of them cracked. It couldn’t have fallen from higher than the second story. Even then, I don’t see how—” He shrugged again.

“They’re the Geezenstacks,” said Aubrey.

“Huh?” Sam asked.

“I’m going to call them the Geezenstacks,” Aubrey said. “Look, this one is Papa Geezenstack and this one is Mama Geezenstack, and the little girl one—that’s—that’s Aubrey Geezenstack. And the other man one, we’ll call him Uncle Geezenstack. The little girl’s uncle.”

Sam chuckled. “Like us, eh? But if Uncle—uh—Geezenstack is Mama Geezenstack’s brother, like Uncle Richard is Mama’s brother, then his name wouldn’t be Geezenstack.”

“Just the same, it is,” Aubrey said. “They’re all Geezenstacks. Papa, will you buy me a house for them?”

“A doll house? Why—” He’d started to say, “Why, sure,” but caught his wife’s eye and remembered. Aubrey’s birthday was only a week off and they’d been wondering what to get her. He changed it hastily to “Why, I don’t know. I’ll think about it.”

It was a beautiful doll house. Only one-story high, but quite elaborate, and with a roof that lifted off so one could rearrange the furniture and move the dolls from room to room. It scaled well with the manikins Uncle Richard had brought.

Aubrey was rapturous. All her other playthings went into eclipse and the doings of the Geezenstacks occupied most of her waking thoughts.

It wasn’t for quite a while that Sam Walters began to notice, and to think about, the strange aspect of the doings of the Geezenstacks. At first, with a quiet chuckle at the coincidences that followed one another.

And then, with a puzzled look in his eyes.